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Battle for Britain's phone numbers

AN American electronic publisher is challenging British TeIecom’s right to copyright its listings of British telephone numbers. ProCD of Danvers, Massachusetts, wants to sell a CD-ROM that contains all Britain’s telephone numbers. If the company succeeds, anyone with a personal computer will be able to search the CD to trace the name and address of anyone who phones them in just a few seconds.

“BT will try and sue us, but we believe we have good legal precedents which say that telephone lists do not qualify for copyright,” says Scott Beatty of ProCD. The company started out two years ago, selling a set of five CDs that electronically indexes all North American telephones. The set stores 72 million residential and 11 million business numbers. Last year, it earned the company &dollar;9 million.

If ProCD wins its fight, computer owners will be able to use the new CD-ROM together with BT’s existing Caller Line Identification system to “reverse search” phone callers’ names and addresses – without their knowledge or permission. BT’s CLI system displays a caller’s number even before the phone rings (Technology, 26 November 1994). ProCD’s system would allow the computer user to key in the phone number revealed by CLI and search back to the name and address of the number’s owner.

BT already puts all business and residential numbers on its own Phone Disc CD-ROM. “This has special security controls to prevent abuse,” says BT. Phone Disc bars reverse searching and stops users siphoning off lists of names, addresses and numbers for junk mailshots and telemarketing.

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ProCD initially approached BT and offered to buy its residential and business databases. BT offered to sell the business data, but ProCD said the price was too high. BT refused any deal on its residential numbers, saying that its customers would object. ProCD is now trying assemble the numbers by scanning BT’s printed directories through an optical character recognition system.

BT’s lawyers are relying on the 1988 Copyright, Designs and Patents Act to block the sale of a scanned CD-ROM. It knows that British law cannot stop ProCD scanning or rekeying abroad, but believes the act’s clause on “secondary infringement” makes it illegal for British businesses to use the discs. ProCD plans to challenge BT’s basic premise that it owns the copyright on the names, addresses and telephone numbers of the phone subscribers.

ProCD cites a seminal decision of the US Court of Appeal in 1991, which dealt with copied telephone directories. The American judges ruled that facts, such as addresses, are not original and therefore cannot be copyrighted. A compilation can be copyrighted if it features an original arrangement of facts, but the copyright is then limited to the arrangement and can never extend to the facts themselves. ProCD believes judges in Britain and Europe will reason the same way.